This was very unfamiliar territory. Ask me anything about some districts of Canterlot and I could rattle off every street name and directions to the last tiny gift shop tucked away in the smallest alleyway. But this part was not somewhere I came regularly, or even at all. The whole change of scenery was almost un-nerving, from the graceful and rustic old stone buildings of Historic Canterlot to these new, smoother buildings that seemed to lack any sort of angle to their edge… simply filleted at the ends by skilled craftsmen. It felt eerily wrong in a way.
Nor did I feel particularly in place the way I was dressed. Ponies were wearing their manes styled in all colours and sizes except… well, brushed. Many pairs of ears glinted with studs and mirrored glasses were commonplace. Certainly no bow-ties.
If luck would have had it, I’d never have come here in the first place. I’d have stuck to my nice cheap tea shops I knew in the quieter areas of the richer districts and walks in the parks when it was late. But as that old famous adage goes, needs must when the devil vomits into your tea-kettle. And when a search for your mysteriously-vanished cellist led you to this part of town… well with such a concert in a month’s time to prepare for, there was no other option.
I’d been suggested many other string players – a lovely mint-green lyre player from Ponyville, as well as a trio of violin players all of whom had plenty of talent, and I’d even taken two of the latter for my group – but I wanted the performance to be perfect. To be perfect it needed a perfect cellist, and there was only the one I knew.
I’d practically bounced to the door of Octavia’s apartment with the news, only to find the mare out. No matter. A slip of paper under the door with instructions to contact me when she returned. That had been two weeks ago.
It wasn’t unusual for Octavia to sometimes take breaks like this, true, but usually she’d told me or another friend where she’d gone beforehand and packed up to leave well in advance – she could be so fussy with her bags. But this wasn’t like the mare I knew at all, and I suspected foul play. Despite the protests of the other two members of the quartet, I packed myself up and decided to do a bit of private investigating.
A dead end of a lead had spent many, many days travelling all across Equestria, first to Ponyville where I’d forced myself to sit through the jabbering of some kind of pink menace before getting another tenuous lead… a rock farm in Hoofingtonshire. However, the mare that greeted me as I opened the door, while bearing plenty of similarities to my close friend, was a different pony altogether.
Ms and Ms Pie were lovely hosts however and their cookery skills while simple felt more filling than anything I’d ever eaten at Canterlot before. I’d taken my leave after a day or two of rest with promises to return at some day before returning to Canterlot in search of a new lead.
This time however, the rumours seemed to point towards the music clubs in New Canterlot. Why on earth Octavia would find anything for her there I knew not, but a lead was a lead, and I wanted to find my band-member. The quartet wasn’t complete without her and no two-bit fiddle players (with no disrespect to Niccolto or Viola intended) would replace her.
I was getting some very strange looks now from the younger ponies clustered around the trendy bars and clubs, pointed hooves pointing out my bow-tie and smooth mane, and no doubt my drab colouring as well.
“Hey pops! Looking for your kids?” one colt called out, voicing the opinions of his peers as they burst into laughter. My cheeks burned red and I held my head high, refusing to talk to them and instead continuing to trot on. I’d been told I’d find the club soon if I just kept walking down the main street and kept my eyes open for the big neon sign, and while I didn’t like the look of the mare who told me as such or her voice, she seemed earnest enough.
I found out just how earnest after only another five minutes’ walking. Neon blue on white, images of music notes everywhere and the name of the club in great high red letters. I grimaced slightly as I looked towards the doors and saw the strobing lights and thumping music from inside. This was not my scene. For that matter, it wasn’t Octavia’s either… but something had brought her here and I’d be buggered if I wasn’t going to find out what it was.
I began to trot towards the door, only to have a grey hoof stuck out right in front of me, blocking my entrance. I blinked and followed the limb towards the great grey stallion standing by the entrance, eyes going wide at his spiky ice-blue mane.
“C’mon dude, I gotta see an ID. Rules are rules,” he drawled at me, obviously bored, but a note of apology in his tone. I got the impression he knew I was older than twenty-one and it rankled a little in me. Did I look –that- old?
“Not a problem. Here,” I said, fishing a business card from inside the lining of my bow-tie where I always kept it. The grey stallion looked over it for a moment, nodding before his eyes went wide.
“Hey! You were supposed to be here ten minutes ago!” he said, suddenly agitated. I dropped my card in disbelief.
“I’m sorry?” I asked, blinking blankly at the bouncer. But already he was pushing open the ‘VIP’ marked door, and beginning to nudge me towards it.
“Vinyl wanted you at nine sharp, boyo. Now don’t piss her off more than you already have. Down the corridor, third room on the left. Trot to it, Maestro!” And with that, the door shut behind me and leaving me inside the club whether I’d wanted to be here or not. I took a breath of the stale air inside the club and looked around.
I found myself in a black-painted corridor with dim lighting overhead, and thick red shag-pile underhoof. The sign on the wall said that this was the ‘VIP’ area, though I wondered just which important ponies came to a hive such as this. Under the instructions from the bouncer, I began to trot down the corridor, looking from side to side at the different doors I passed. Security booth, do not enter. Changing rooms. Bathroom. Dance Floor. Bar. Third door on the left: ‘DJ’s quarters – stay out if you ‘aint got booze’. Ain’t. Written on the door. And spelt incorrectly. I didn’t like the look of this one bit, but I raised my hoof gingerly and knocked on the door.
“For buck’s sake, took your time!” yelled a loud voice inside. I winced at the fury of it, and backed away slightly as I saw the field of red magic coalesce about the doorknob and hurl it open. “Shit, Blues, we agreed you wouldn’t keep…” the voice snapped seconds before it seemed to register I wasn’t the pony she meant to be shouting at.
“Um… the bouncer told me I needed to come here?” I asked, looking over the figure that had just smashed open the door in her irritation. I’d not seen a coat that white since I last saw Princess Celestia, or that strumpet Fancy Pants always kept on his hoof. It was tinged with only the tiniest trace of lemon yellow in the highlights, and contrasted shockingly with the electric blue of her mane. With another glow of that red-tinged magic, the pair of massive violet spectacles were removed from her muzzle and I got a full glance at a pair of intense, ruby-red eyes.
“Whoa. Ziggy really is getting bucking blind if he thinks you’re Blues,” she said after a long moment, her accent from Manehatten, though I could detect just a bit of the clipped vowels that indicated a Canterlot upbringing. Her head tilted to the side, and took a glance at my cutie mark – for some reason this made me rather uncomfortable. Before, anypony had only had a cursory glance at my flank but this white unicorn was gazing at it, almost assessing it.
“Huh. Well guess that’s one thing he almost got right,” she muttered, straightening up to look me in the eyes again. “So, you some kind of music guy?” she asked, leaning against the doorjamb. I nodded, fishing for my card only to find that I’d dropped it outside with the bouncer. I needed to introduce myself.
“Frederic Horseshoepin. Pianist,” I said with a slight bow. To my surprise, the unicorn gave a massive pearly-white grin at that, and chuckled.
“Heh. Cute,” she said with a wink. I was taken aback. I was used to sniffs and nods, or polite applause from the Canterlot crowd. “I’m Scratch. Vinyl Scratch. Mind if I call you Freddy?” she asked, offering a hoof. More out of automatic reflex than anything, I took it and shook.
“Um, of course,” I replied, and she giggled a little more like a schoolfilly. Realising that she was in a good mood and I could capitalize on this. “Listen… I think your friend at the door got me wrong. I’m actually looking for my friend. She’s a grey mare with a black mane, a pink treble clef for a cutie mark…” I had her at ‘grey mare’. I saw her eyes go wide, and she nodded.
“Yup. Tavi, I remember her. Any reason you’re looking for her?” she asked, crossing her forelegs as she continued to survey me. My face had lit up at that – nopony in their right mind could all anypony else but Octavia ‘Tavi’. Likely as not the mare hated it, more than I didn’t like ‘Freddy’. But whatever made the unicorn happy.
“My quartet… her quartet. We’ve got a performance in a few weeks at the Royal Opera Hall, but she hasn’t been around for me to tell her. I want her to come back and do some practice with us.” At that, Vinyl Scratch’s face fell slightly, and she began to scowl.
“Bah. And I thought you were getting interesting, Freddy,” she said, glaring at me with those big red eyes. I wondered what I’d done wrong. “But what the buck. I need me a musician and Blues is off banging… his fillyfriend. That leaves you here maestro, and you want information. So here’s the deal.”
“You play with me tonight, full set, two hours, and I’ll spill all the beans on what your friend’s been doing, and maybe where she is if you need to go talk to her. But not unless you do your part. Capiche?” she asked. I spluttered.
“What? But I can’t play here… I’m a concert pianist! I don’t know anything about clubs, and parties, and raves, and…” I began, but Vinyl cut me off with a murderous gesture of her hoof.
“You don’t need to know anything about them, maestro. You just need to rattle out the tunes I put in front of you, and I’ll take care of the crowd. You can read music, right?” I nodded, feeling my chest rise a little.
“Anything you show me I’ll do it. I’m no prodigy, but I have good hooves,” I puffed just a little. The smile came back to Vinyl’s face and she dropped her glasses from her horn onto her snout again, hiding her eyes.
“Alright Freddy. Follow me,” she said, and with a flick of her horn, closed the door behind her and trotted out into the corridor. I followed her obediently, doing my best not to look at her shifting, swaying rump. Difficult though. There was rather a lot of it.
“We’ve got an electric keyboard somewhere… hope that’s alright for you? Don’t really have the money for one of those big ones with three legs,” she said as she walked, and the conversation was the perfect moment for me to stop staring at her behind.
“Uh… yeah. Grand Piano. And the keyboard should be fine. I’m guessing that I’m just playing the music, you’re… playing about with it?” I asked. She looked over her shoulder and though I couldn’t tell through the glasses, she looked like she was winking.
“Heh. Guess that’s the best way to say it. Alright Maestro, get yourself ready for some noise… this ain’t no hoity toity crowd in Old Canterlot. People want noise and action, so you’re gonna play Fortissimo and Allegro, got it?” I froze an instant before she did.
“How do you know the terms for ‘hard’ and ‘fast’ in classic music?” I asked, trotting a little faster to keep up with her now. A red flush was coating her cheeks and I wondered if there was more to the DJ than I first suspected.
“Heh… you gotta research this stuff sometimes. And I flicked through a piano book once or twice,” she insisted, tail swishing to and fro. “Anyway,” she added loudly before I could ask any more. “Here we go. Moment of truth, maestro. You still want to find your friend?” We had arrived at a large pair of double doors. From behind, I could hear a pounding and a roaring of almost a hundred probably drunk young ponies. I swallowed.
“Yes.” I lied.
The very first time I played in public, it was with a full orchestra from my school in which I only had a single role. I began to get solos as I grew older and became more adept with the great ivory and ebony beast, but for the most part I was always with other ponies. This was something my friends always considered rather strange – I always had stage fright when out on my own.
I simply could not perform if all the eyes were on me alone. If there were dancers, if there were other musicians – if there was a fool singing along in the audience… I was fine. But stick me under the spotlight in a silent, packed theatre and you would see Frederic Opus Horseshoepin break down into a little ball of terrified pony.
And so in my adult life I never struck out on my own like some enterprising musicians have and made great names for themselves. I have always tried to culture good friends and other talented musicians around me to form groups. I have never gone out on stage with a pony I haven’t known since music school. Until now.
The roar of the crowd was something that chilled me right to my very bone. I’d never performed before a gaggle such as the ponies that Vinyl Scratch led me out to and my eyes threatened to drop right of out my sockets then and there. I could feel my stomach doing uncomfortable flips and my throat tying itself in knots. I just wanted to run away, and forget all about Octavia and Vinyl Scratch and this whole stupid club.
“Wassamatter, Freddy? You getting cold hooves?” I looked about, tearing my eyes from the trendy dance club floor to where Vinyl Scratch was seating herself behind some kind of massive sound system with all number of dials and buttons and switches on, uses of which I couldn’t begin to comprehend. The coffee machine in the place we used for rehearsals was bad enough.
“Yes,” I admitted with a nodding head even as she began to magic across my keyboard for the evening. Compared to what I was used to, it was like a little plastic child’s toy. But I felt small enough to match as I heard the stamping of the crowd. To my surprise, Vinyl looked round, and dipped her shades a notch.
“Whoa. C’mon Freddy, you can do this. You’re a big manly colt,” she said, trotting to my side and giving me a nudge on the shoulder with a hoof. “Trust me. I’ve seen stallions that wouldn’t go a step outside their own damn homes without a bunch of bodyguards and servants,” she said with a curl of her lip.
“You’re big enough for this. C’mon. You got the nerve or you don’t, and you got it, Maestro. Plus, this isn’t like my rave clubs. It’s kinda more dancing,” she said with what I assumed was supposed to be a reassuring grin. It reminded me more of a rictus face on one of those zebra masks I’d seen at the museum.
“Just dance?” I asked, beginning to feel a bit of my wariness fade away. Vinyl grinned wider.
“Well. Dancing, chilling out. These are mostly students out for a night without too much booze. They want some good music and that means some classics everypony knows,” she said. A sheaf of well-worn papers were brought across to the music stand on my keyboard and shuffled nicely for me, even though I turned my nose up a little at a coffee stain on the first page.
“All you need to do is play, Freddy. I’ll take care of everything else,” the unicorn insisted. I looked closer at the pages, and felt my eyes widen as I looked eagerly at the first page. I knew this song. It was one of my guilty pleasures. I flicked through a few more of the pieces of paper and my smile grew. It faded instantly as I heard a magically enhanced voice boom out over the crowd.
“Aaaaalright! How are you Canterlot?” screamed Vinyl Scratch. The answering roar from the crowd made me dive for cover behind the stool I had salvaged for my piano playing. Miss Scratch seemed to enjoy the attention though, relishing in it and whooping right back with them.
“Yeah! That’s what I like to see, peeps. And so many of you here for my special classic nights!” I cracked an eyebrow open at that. This was a regular thing? Had Octavia been dragged into this much as I had? And what about that pony she and the bouncer mentioned before? Blues?
“Now, I know I promised you guys some more jazz tonight, but that lazy bum of a sax hasn’t shown up,” Vinyl boomed out and the response was far from favourable this time. But as I watched, the unicorn seemed to weather the storm of boos from the crowd with expert waves of her hooves, calming them down like she was a conductor of some kind of rowdy, beer-fuelled orchestra.
“Hey hey. I’m as pissed as you guys are. I had some cracking stuff lined up, and he’s decided he’s gonna spend the night with his fillyfriend. Can’t blame him at least,” she said with that shrug of her shoulders so nonchalant. Now the boos were mostly muted, with wolf-whistles and cries of encouragement and assent. I’d seen footage of war leaders with less ability to control a crowd than this DJ.
“But here’s the good news – you don’t get nothing tonight,” she said. I could have sworn someone just poured ice cold liquid right into my belly as a whoop went up from the crowd. “Ziggy found all of you a nice little pianist wandering about who’s going to put on some classics for all of us. Give it up for Freddy!”
I was used to polite applause. Sometimes standing ovations when my group had done exceptionally well. What I had never experienced before was the sheer wave of noise that came up from the pit of partiers, screaming my name. Or at least that horrid abbreviation Vinyl had come up with. I peeked out from behind my stool and keyboard to stare at the heaving mass of ponies and wanted nothing more than to keel over dead right there and then.
“Whoo! That’s it! C’mon Freddy, get yourself up here and say hello to the crowd!” a voice I suddenly never wanted to hear again said, and I felt something grab hold of the back of my collar and yank me out of my hiding place. Like it or not I was standing in front of the entire hall and each and every one was stamping their hooves like somepony had dumped a bucket of spiders on the dance floor.
“See them?” asked Vinyl, pulling close to my ear. “Buck all of them. They don’t care if you get a note wrong or if your collar’s not on straight. They just want to hear good music,” she insisted, and for a sudden moment I felt rather comforted. My mouth stopped being so dry as I looked across to her, and did a double take as I saw the bitterness in her eyes.
“V… Miss Scratch?” I asked. She looked round, and gave a pearly white grin before she shoved me right back onto the piano stool which twirled around in a similar motion to the way my pupils are going.
“Question and answer session is after the show, Maestro. Now lets’ hear some music!” she cried out in her loud voice, and somehow the ponies in the pit below began to let loose an even louder torrent of noise before. Surely now they’d have to quieten down for the music at least.
I stopped the revolutions of the piano stool and cleared my throat a little. The page was already open on the first song, one of my favourites – though I’d never heard a piano version of it. I took a deep breath, and played the first few notes.
Suddenly, I found myself at ease. I wasn’t looking at everypony on the floor, I was looking at the music. My hooves were scampering across the keys one after another, playing out those familiar bars I remembered so well from my records. All of a sudden though I was aware that nopony was actually watching me. I peeked my head away from my music and saw a sight which to this day beggars belief.
I could see the music coming out of my piano into the air, or at least partially. A stream of silvery notes swam from the speakers on my pathetic little keyboard, and seemed to be sucked towards the mass of machinery that Vinyl Scratch was working at. The unicorn’s shades were down, her horn glowing that blood-red to match her eyes as she played with the various switches, dials and buttons on the incomprehensible device she sat at. What I could see pouring from the speakers though was pure magic.
Great clouds of silvery-black smoke formed of twisting musical notes oozed out in some kind of parody of the cloud factories of the Pegasi. I could see semiquavers knotted into minims as they knitted themselves into their desired form. A great treble clef seemed to bend a bass clef into a semicircular shape and it became a silvery moon. The crowd were edging away from it, but rather than fear there was tension and excitement on their faces.
I continued to play out the music as the moon got brighter and the clouds got thicker. I stared at Vinyl as she seemed to finally be happy with what her machine was doing. Her magic never faded, but she began to levitate across a microphone. I wondered idly what she needed it for considering how loud she’d made her voice earlier when I realised that we were at the entry of the vocals.
“Moon… Mare…” crooned a pitch-perfect replica of the original vocals, though smokier, as if Sapphire Shores had been drinking a little beforehand. “Ooooh… fix me with your… stare…” I simply refused to believe my eyes. The scratchy-voiced unicorn I’d talked to earlier was singing as if she were a multi-million dollar record label, and I knew no amount of recording machines could do that. This was magic in its’ purest sense.
I saw that white-furred face turn to look at me, and a hoof lifted up her violet glasses for just a second, eyes gazing at me with a smile and a wink.
“I…” she said, her mouth seeming to form the words and then that gorgeous tone simply pouring from the speakers into the cloudy, moonlit dance floor. “Met a cold… dark colt…”
I turned away from the mare and focused on the music. There was little hope for me concentrating with such a voice and a stare in those ruby red eyes.
The next two hours passed in a blur of music and song. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had so much fun just belting out some old tunes while Vinyl matched the lyrics word for word and tone by tone beside me. Even the deep dark voices of the stallions in some of them, during which I noticed her magic was glowing particularly strongly.
The last piece had been one that had ruined my hooves even talented as they were. I ached all over as I hauled myself off the stool to all four limbs, glaring at Vinyl as she seemed to leap off as limber as a spring chicken.
“Whoo!” she screamed out, echoed by the roaring noise from the crowd. “Did you all enjoy that?” I took from the wall of sound they meant yes. Scratch didn’t seem to bat an eyelid behind those glasses as she trotted back and wrapped a hoof about my neck.
“Lets’ hear it for Maestro here! You all know I couldn’t do this without him!” she shouted, and I could detect a trace of hoarseness in her voice. I looked out to the crowd of young ponies and waved at them wearily, getting their standard style of applause in response until I lowered my hoof and eased myself away from Vinyl Scratch.
“Head back to my room Maestro… feel free to break out the drinks,” she whispered to me as I turned away. I looked back as I trotted exhaustedly out of the limelight to let Scratch yell and shout back at her fans again. My head was ringing and a good whisky seemed like the perfect antidote to all my problems.
It took a while to find the DJ’s door again, with the help of the bouncer who’d accosted me earlier. I never got his name, but he seemed to clap me on the shoulder and said some encouraging words in what was probably a normal voice but sounded far far too soft from what I’d been used to.
To my hooves’ relief, the floor inside Vinyl Scratch’s room was even thicker red shag-pile than outside, and felt great as I walked across it to a long lounge chair and flopped down on it, completely out of it.
I looked back on tonight with wonder. Somehow my musical talent really had come in useful on this goose chase of trying to find Octavia to my utter disbelief, as long as Scratch honoured her end of the bargain. I didn’t think she was the type to lie of course, but I didn’t intend to leave until the white unicorn had spilled the beans.
I began to wonder about my impromptu performer on stage with me, with nothing else to do in her room but relax it took little time for my head to start working. She knew something of ‘proper’ music as some ponies would put it, that was for sure. Had she gone to the Canterlot Music Academy too? If so, why was she here instead of joining Octavia and I on stage?
I began to wonder if perhaps her talent for music wasn’t quite the same as mine in terms of making it… but refining it. I’d had quite the conversation with some bakers one day, and he stressed the importance of being able to put the ‘finishing touches’ on something. Nopony ever made something perfect on their own, was the argument.
I took an opportunity to look about the room as soon as I felt adventurous enough to look outside my own head. It was a pretty big room, easily the size of most master bedrooms, though rather than the massive double bed that most such rooms are furnished in, this had the walls covered side to side with stereos, broken instruments and little bits of wiring I didn’t even want to imagine were for. I noticed a battered old saxophone, something that looked like a burst set of bagpipes…
And a broken old cello resting against in a corner of the room, distinctly looking like it had been smashed to bits with an angry hoof. My heart stopped as the door opened.
“Heya Freddy,” Vinyl said with a smile as she trotted in, her magic levitating the keyboard I’d used. “I got you a souvenir,” she said, a grin on her face looking very much like some kind of lunatic that just escaped from the madhouse. “I thought I told you to open up the drinks cabinet? Couldn’t find it?”
I swallowed lightly as the keyboard was tossed to the side of the room, clattering noisily but mostly unbroken. The white unicorn opened a big black drinks container that indeed I hadn’t noticed (the ruined guitar over it had attracted my attention more) and brought out a big square bottle of something golden.
“Whassamatter Freddy? You look like you’ve seen a ghost? I know my butt’s big but surely you’ve seen bigger,” she teased, trotting back to where I was laid out, the insides of my ears turning a chalk white.
“What have you done with Octavia?” I demanded.